Corporate and government security procedures have long utilized destruction techniques and devices to prevent the unnecessary storage and unauthorized distribution of sensitive or confidential information. Such destruction frequently takes place routinely according to pre-determined time schedules as well as in emergency situations. Previously, incinerators as well as paper shredders of various sizes and speeds have been utilized to destroy government or corporate proprietary and confidential information both routinely as well as during emergency situations, such as during the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran or on board U.S. warships. Unfortunately, the mere volume of such confidential paper documents prohibits an effective emergency destruction process. Moreover, even paper shredders having very fine shredding capability are not entirely effective in preventing the reconstruction of the documents and retrieval of at least some of the information contained therein. This, too, became apparent during the Tehran incident.
With an ever-growing demand for 8 cm and 12 cm compact disc related products as well as the continuing increase in data storage capacity, of such discs, businesses and government agencies are placing more and more sensitive and corporate-confidential information on optical discs such as compact discs (CD's), DVD's, and Blu-Laser. While such compact and efficient data storage media has significantly reduced the volume problem associated with prior confidential paper documents as discussed above, such optical disc storage has created problems of its own, such as how to destroy an optical disc or at least the information contained thereon once it has been created.
Typical commercial or home destruction of an optical disc involves shredding or slicing the disc into small pieces. Such destruction is of limited effectiveness since even a 1 mm×1 mm particle of a shredded disc could contain as much as one hundred or more pages of information and there is available software that can read such information from the digital signatures.
In response to the ever-increasing use of optical discs as a media storage form, and in recognition of the limitations of shredding or other physical destruction processes, the Department of Defense (DOD) issued secure destruction standards for compact disc media. Specifically, the DOD requires that when the information-bearing surface (IBS) of a CD is altered to the extent that no exploitable information can be recovered, then the CD is considered securely destroyed. NIST also is working on standards for media sanitization for all known electronic media under their “Guidelines for Media Sanitization”. The principal goal of any destruction process for optical discs is to assure that no exploitable information can be recovered from an information-bearing layer of the optical disc. If a destruction process consumes the entire optical disc, the resulting particles can be no larger than 0.25 mm or 250 microns in any dimension in order to insure 100% destruction of digital data. Alternatively, if the destruction process destroys only an information bearing surface layer of the optical disc, then the dimensions of the resulting particulate residue cannot be greater than 0.25 mm or 250 microns, while the remaining polycarbonate substrate layer cannot be greater than 1.05 mm+/−0.03 mm thick.
There are several devices presently available that destroy the information-bearing layer of an optical disc to the standards of the DOD. Emerging products, including the one herein described, addresses standards not only suitable to the DOD but to commercial interests as well. Such a device addresses in a fundamental way the loopholes that exist in Federal legislation that call for safe digital data destruction in HIPAA, Gramm-Leach Bliley, FACTA, Sarbannes-Oxley and other legislation that calls for total destruction of digital data, but fall short of identifying the technical processes. However, there is a need for an easy to operate, portable device that can adjust its cutting parameters to the type of optical disc being treated.